Here’s what happens when you put a floating Christmas tree in the river and decide to make it twice as tacky as last year, but forget that there’s an all-time record flood on the way.

Your giant floating Christmas tree breaks its cables and scoots off downriver, before crashing into a bridge so that you have to call the cops who all stand around with their hands in their pockets looking at the fucking thing, while they wait for a crane to arrive.

Welcome to Limerick 2009.

The poor old tree is looking bit sad now, but then again, it never looked too good anyway, did it?

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If it is any consolation the whole country seems to have turned into a lake. I feel very sorry for the unfortunate animals out in this. I must admit that I find all the Christmas thing a bit stupid at this stage.
I suppose the errant tree might help to distract from our current woes.

Pity the bridge doesn’t open. The whole ugly monsterocity could have sailed off into the night to become a blight on someone elses landscape. Doesn’t anyone in Limerick Council know the difference between a tree & a pylon.

Great to see the City Council haveing money to waste on this kind of idiocy. If it knocked a chip off the bridge they’ll be saying they need a new bridge. Good comment on the Gardai standing around scratching their arses, Bock.

Well said Brian. If it wasn’t for the new bridge the fucker would be in Kilrush now. What would our Clare neighbours make of it, as they dance naked around their fires paying homage to the various Gods that pass across the night sky? Given time I reckon that they’d reckon that our steel cage was a God also.
I reckon they’d eventually worship it.

“Doesn’t anyone in Limerick Council know the difference between a tree & a pylon (?)”
Brilliant comment and a damn good thing to point out, as the first thing I saw in the picture was a lopsided pylon in a river, and no Christmas tree.
What sort of gnome commissioned that monstrosity?

Tree my bollix!
Spoke with one of the ‘Team’ responsible last night; idiot insisted it was a terrible thing to happen to the corpo’s lovely tree! Seems there are somewhere in the region of fifty or so people involved in getting us this so called tree every year. Limerick’s version of a quango perhaps.
Fuck ’em and the tiger they rode in on!

It’s probably as well not to jump to conclusions yet. It could have been a contractor who was installing the tree when it broke away and the salvage operation is probably covered by someone’s insurance.

Someone told me that the the local is reporting that the ESB unleashed thousands of gallons of water into the Shannon and that’s the reason the “tree” did an Enya (sail away, sail away. sail away) ? Can anyone confirm this? Our poor old eco friendly tree.Do you know that it is powered completly from the eyelashes and scrotums of recently deceased, bi-sexual Cambodian oranguatans. You’ll find no carbon footprints attached to our tree.How much did it cost to hire all those cranes to haul a steel cage out of the water?

An engineer from the Council was on the television a short time ago explaining that the flooding along the Shannon is caused by the fact that rainwater wants to flow to the sea. You can’t beat a good technical education, gives a young fella a great edge over everybody else..